


Bought and Sold (Honor for Strength)

by Flamel



Category: One Piece
Genre: Character Study, Gen, No Beta, POV Nami, Post-Time Skip, Pre-Whole Cake Island, We Die Like Ace
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-04
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-17 06:14:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29837271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flamel/pseuds/Flamel
Summary: Nami has always weighed her morals by her circumstances, sold her honor for her strength.  Being part of the Strawhats has given her the power to be kind again, the high ground she needs to be honest.  Nami muses on strength, and honor, and the value of both money and lives.
Relationships: Mugiwara Kaizoku | Strawhat Pirates & Nami
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	Bought and Sold (Honor for Strength)

**Author's Note:**

> I've been meaning to write a character study on Nami for awhile, and finally sat down to do it. She's such an interesting character and I love her a lot. This was mostly inspired by one particular scene, during the whole retrieving Robin arc, where Sanji fails to fight a woman to save Robin and Nami calls him an idiot, but admits she admires his resolve to his principles. It made me think a lot about how Nami in particular views honor and necessity.
> 
> Anyways this is just for fun and probably not my best work, but whatever. Enjoy!

Honor, for Nami, has always been a privilege. She could not carry honor with her when she was already carrying the lives of everyone she loved. She wasn’t strong enough for both. Honor, Nami knows, is something that one must be strong to have, and if you are not strong, well. Honor can be sold. Principles, morals, right and wrong- everything has a price. The secret is in knowing the value of things. And Nami knows the value of money. Once, Arlong put a concrete price on the life of everyone Nami had ever known and loved. She has heard people muse on what a human life is worth- Nami could give you the exact number. She once bought the lives of her entire village for the promise of one hundred million Beris, her potential, her services, and her freedom. Even now, she could tell you how much each of her dearest friends and her own head is worth- after all the government publishes the information publicly! So that is the value of money- the lives of those she cares about.

Nami hoards money because she knows exactly what it can buy. Medicine, repairs, weapons, food, bribes for Marines, the safety of her loved ones. Very little cannot be bought, if you know the right price, if you can pay it.

  
It’s why she treasures so dearly the things money cannot get her. No treasure trove in the world could have bought her Luffy’s respect, no price except her skills and her self could have paid for her position on this crew. She could have bought Zoro’s skills as a bodyguard, but never his regard, and he would have never listened to her the way he does now, as her nakama. She could have never trusted a Robin recruited through coin, never gained Chopper’s affection as only a patient, never gained Usopp’s camaraderie and understanding with a bill. She could have hired Franky as a shipwright, but never as a friend, and no coin would ever buy the genius and thoughtfulness he pours into the work he does for them. That had to be earned, through character, through respect. Even Sanji, as eager to please any woman as ever- when things get serious, when things are difficult, he knows her skills and her abilities, when he plans he puts her where she can do the most good, not just where he can protect her. Nami could not buy his faith in her for love nor money, and so she treats it like the treasure it is.

With them, with their strength and their faith and their respect, with Luffy always at her back and on her side, she has been able to pick up honor again. To be kind. To reach out to the weak, to be honest, to offer aid, to be fair. She takes delight in these things, knowing she would abandon them again if she ever needed to. Nami knows the values of things, and her honor has never been worth the lives of her friends.

Nami was surprised to learn that Zoro knew this, knew how to sell his honor for the strength to defend his friends. He comes back to them, two years later and one eye down and tells them he trained with Mihawk, and Nami is surprised. She’s not a swordswoman, she has no instinct for their convoluted rules of combat, for their rigid and exacting codes of honor, but she does know Zoro. And she pays attention. She knows that he would have considered that action shameful, she knows he broke personal rules for that. She also knows about the scar that bisects his torso, and the story of how he got it. Nami would not have guessed that he understood that honor was a burden you had to be strong enough to carry, that could be laid down to prioritize other things, not the way he lived and breathed it, not the way he was willing to die for it. But then again, she thinks, that might be the point. He was willing to trade his own life for his honor, but not theirs. She feels touched at the thought, and aches at the sacrifice.

Nami learned more about him from this then she thinks he meant for her to know. Zoro is her nakama, a dear friend, almost like a brother to her, but he doesn’t talk about his past. Luffy believes the past belongs there, and Nami, looking at her bright and brilliant future, eagerly agrees. She’s never pressed him. But she does know people. She knows the desperation he brings to his quest, the single minded determination. She knows it from the mirror, from having a village’s worth of lives on her back. She remembers it in Sanji, so certain he had a debt to pay that he would have spent his life in that restaurant. She knows it from Vivi, and the responsibilities she shouldered for her people. But Nami would have never allowed herself to die, not when all the lives she carried with her would be forfeit. And Sanji might have fought with his life on the line to protect the restaurant, but he never would have opened his arms to death for it. He knows dead men pay no debts. And Vivi might have been willing to trade her life for the safety of her people, but to offer it up only in the name of honor? A dead woman protects no one. Nami wonders what ghost haunts Zoro, what promises he made to someone who can no longer collect. Someone he loved, she thinks, to have forged such steel into his spine. Someone he lost, she thinks, looking at his recklessness in the name of his dream. Not someone he thinks he’ll see again. A woman, maybe, she considers, thinking about how offended he gets at Sanji’s antics. Men, in her experience, don’t think about issues like that without prompting, and don’t see that particular brand of sexism for what it is without knowing someone who would be offended. And for all that Zoro has been accused of sexism, mainly from women he refused to kill, Nami has always considered him remarkably even-handed. She has also seen him spare just as many men.

Still, whoever taught him that there is strength in women might have been a different person than whatever ghost drives him forward. People can have more than one important figure in their lives. She wonders if it was the woman, or the ghost, or both or neither who taught him the fragility of strength, that even the mighty can fall. To accidents, to illness, to carelessness, to the clever who take advantage of all three. Whoever it was taught Zoro the value of honor, and he sells it dearly but he will sell it all the same. It is both a comfort and a terrible grief, to know that Zoro will do what is necessary for them, even if he has to sell his soul to do it.

  
Sanji does not know how to sell honor at all. Which is a kind of shame, because his honor is also stupid. He tried, she knows, when Robin’s life was on the line and he was asked to fight a woman to save her. He tried so hard, but his principles are written into his very bones and he does not know how to pry them loose. Sanji let Nami fight her instead, and his faith in her was honestly the only thing that kept her from smacking him. Sanji has issues. Still, there’s something almost charming, and admirable, that he is so incapable of laying his honor down. Nami, who has abandoned it and bartered it and will again in a heartbeat if those she loves are in danger, can’t help but appreciate the tenacity to which Sanji holds to his morals. Even if they are stupid morals.

The others, except for Luffy, know the value of being clever over being strong. Chopper, for all that he can turn himself into a monster, was prey first and he knows how easily even the strong can break. Usopp makes his living in trickery and cleverness and lies. He wears a million masks and he finds his strength somewhere among them. Frankly, it’s the most confusing shell game she’s ever seen, but it does seem to work for him. Franky knows better than anyone except maybe her that dreams come with a price tag, that actions have consequences, that some things break beyond anyone’s ability to fix them. Franky engineers his own strengths and limits, and Cutty Flam knows that secrets can save what strength will fail. Robin- Robin is strong now, but her enemies have always been stronger. She made her living in treachery just as much as Nami did, if not more. The two of them share a wisdom stronger than sisterhood and a kindred soul.

Luffy does not even know honor can be sold. It’s why Nami wishes she had been there, at Marineford, when strength came so close but did not carry the day. She wishes she could have sold her honor for him, to be the eyes at his back, and the thief in the night, to be tricky in the wake of his eye catching destruction, to have lied for him when honesty put him in danger, to have helped carry away his brother’s life, from that battlefield. Luffy has never been clever. Sometimes… sometimes she sees a glimmer of something in him, cogs in a machine she cannot fathom, and she wonders who taught him that trickery will always need to rely on strength. To be a law unto himself, to gather all his burdens up because if he carries them long enough, he will become strong enough to hold them all. She wonders if it’s the same person who taught him that honor has no value to anyone except the one it belongs to. It’s so strange- he treats it as integral, as nothing more or less than the expression of his soul. He doesn’t help people because it’s the right thing to do, he helps people because he wants to. Luffy does not seem to be able to grasp the concept of doing things you are ashamed of to serve a greater purpose. He knows what’s important to him and will sacrifice no part of it. He has never asked her to lie for his sake, and when she makes promises, he is quick to help her uphold them. He values her for her honest skills, not the deceitfulness she is so very good at. It’s not that he makes her feel ashamed of them either, it’s more like…

At Arlong Park. Where every piece of evidence painted her a traitor. Where all the worst of her was laid bare before him. All her darkness and her failings and the depths she would sink to. And he looked her in the eyes and saw something there that made him believe she was more than she appeared to be. Or even before that, when they faced Buggy and she was deep in her role as a liar and thief, who declared she hated him, and he looked at her and decided she was a friend. Like when Zoro, who has always shared a brain cell with Luffy, looked her dead in the eyes and threw himself into the ocean with his hands tied, a challenge to the monster she told him she was.

Luffy has always encouraged her to be better than she is. When all her tricks ran out and she finally asked him for help because she had no more cards left to play, he gave her his hat and his strength to lean on and she has been ever since. She uses his strength to make herself better, but he looks at her like she’s just… showing something that was in her all along. Uncovering herself, instead of building herself up. He has faith in her, just as much as she has faith in him, unwavering and as certain as the sun. She knows her loyalty is something that can not be bought. It makes her think, it makes her hope, that maybe there are also parts of her that can never be sold.


End file.
